.

January 28, 2010

Sometimes you can tell from the first frame of a movie that it's going to be awesome, and this is one of those. Just the opening has everything you need: it's just the first five Kamen Riders-- 1, 2, V3, Riderman, and X, if you were taking notes-- taking turns posing, doing sweet jumps on their bikes, and getting out of a small plane. Towards the end they do an X-shaped five-man handshake that you must see. Did I mention Ichiro Mizuki? I don't watch a lot of live-action superhero stuff, but when I do, this is how I like it: silly. I've tried to watch more recent Kamen Rider series on more than one occassion, but they're a little too mopey for me. God, that First movie!

Anyway, like the Great Mazinger movie I just talked about, (I'd like to thank /m/ real quick) this is a team-up movie for the kids. It just doesn't lie to you about what's going on. Five Riders most certainly fight against that son of a bitch King Dark and his evil organization G.O.D. in this half-hour movie. King Dark is a big ol' statue who's stuck in the perpetual-boredom pose you see here. The monster under wraps is his strongest henchman yet, Bat Franken: he's Frankenstein's monster, and a vampire bat, and he has a cannon on his back, and he wears a cape. This caliber of dude-- not to mention his henchmen, a pantheon of rubber-suited Greek gods-- needs quite a number of riders to beat.

It really doesn't get much more fun than Riders beating up dudes in monster suits. I especially love the genre-standard shots, clearly taken somewhere else in front of a screen, of guys flipping over the camera or flying back from the impact of a fierce Rider Kick. Speaking of Rider Kicks, at the end of this movie Rider 1 flings X up into the air, over the other Riders, as they each say one word of "X-- RIDER-- SUPER-- HIGH-- KICK!". Bat Franken is knocked onto a hill of defeated monsters, naturally, and the lot of them explode. That is what I am talking about.

There are also a couple of great moments with the kid who represents the viewer: he just wakes up in the middle of the night and, very serious, very collected, explains to his family that G.O.D. is up to something and he's got to call X-Rider right now. Now X-Rider isn't in at the moment, so the kid runs out the door to see Rider 1 standing in front of him. He knew something was up! This kid appears twice, and both times the Riders thank him and tell him what a great job he did. As if to erase any doubt as to who this film is for, two ads for TV Land magazine-- which covers your favorite kids' shows like Mazinger and Kamen Rider-- show up on screen after the credits, as the Riders' triumphant theme fades. Being a kid is sweet, ain't it?

January 27, 2010

As you're certainly aware, the internet has been a free ride for years now. Considering that's not really sustainable, people have been trying to figure out ways to monetize their sites. What will people pay for on the internet, anyway? Well, Youtube just rolled out a video rental feature. This will probably do fine for them when it's stuff like movies you can only see at Sundance, but we're not here to talk about classy things. We're here to talk about anime, and god help us.

Funimation and ADV-- oh, god, I'm sorry, The Anime Network-- are both taking part in the rental service: TAN already has a pay setup going, though I still don't know who would pay as much as a Netflix subscription to watch exclusively ADV/Section 23 content. Funi, I'm pretty sure, has not tried this yet.

Funi's setup is reasonable, actually: they're only applying it to their English-dubbed titles (which they do pay a lot of money to make and which, to be fair, I don't really care about). After the first few episodes of a show, 24-hour "rentals" cost a dollar. That's impulse buy territory, but obviously it's still going to run you $10 or $20 to watch a full show. Considering Funi's DVDs will run you $30 or $60 to watch a full show, this isn't too bad: it's not as cheap as Netflix, either, but you don't have to wait for the DVDs to show up in the mail. Speaking for myself, I wouldn't buy Funi's DVD boxes because the video quality is ass, and I have enough self-control to wait a day to watch another five episodes of a TV show.

The Anime Network, as always, is not so clever. They don't have any free episodes of their pay series to hook the viewer, and episodes cost two bucks apiece, making a 7-day rental (it's not like you will somehow make use of those extra days!) about as expensive as one of Section 23's box sets costs to buy online. At least with the Funi rental service I can imagine a theoretical situation in which I might use it: who on earth would use this? TAN's model has always been "you'll pay up the way we want you to for what we want you to watch," and that can't be going too great for them. I think this is all best repesented by the fact that the wallpaper on TAN's Youtube account features characters from the ADV-produced and terrible Sin the Movie and Lady Death anime.

Now that the we're done with the rundown, how do you suppose anime fans, those rare, beautiful creatures, have been dealing with this news? If you said "spluttering, howling rage," you are correct! It's been a week, view numbers are pretty low (some of the Anime Network vids have zero views), the few comments left on these videos consist of fan rage, and the videos all have one-star ratings. Is making $20 on an episode and making anime fans cry and whine (its own payment, a payment to the heart) actually better than the ad money? Does the average viewer give a damn, when pirated copies are just next door, and there's tons of great, free content already available online? I wonder.

January 26, 2010

This happened a little while back, but since I've been following the recent adventures of niche Japanese shooting game company Cave outside of Japan, I should probably give it a post.

After years of remaining oblivious to their international cult following, Cave has finally expressed interest in getting into markets outside of Japan. Mushihime Futari was released region-free-- a first for Japanese Xbox 360 releases-- and I was happy. Their upcoming Japanese game, Espgaluda II, is looking like it won't be (we can safely interpret Cave's subsequent silence on the matter as a confirmation).

This puzzled me for two reasons: one, it seemed silly to create goodwill in the market with international releases and then just drop them. Second, the only other option was to actually localize these games, and that's just isn't feasible for all the stuff Cave puts out. You see, these games don't sell. First, on account of their one-sitting length, these games must be sold for cheap: when Raiden IV came out for $40 people were shocked, shocked by the price.

Aside: an unfortunate side effect of cheap, old games on download services is you can't sell a new arcade-style game anymore without some tool saying "this should be ten bucks on Live" because there are re-releases of a bunch of shooters that already made their money on XBL. Just saying.

These games don't do well critically, either, and with good reason: as straight arcade ports they don't really serve anybody but a previously indoctrinated fanbase that is perfectly happy with their genre's ultra-niche status. This is fine if you're into what these games are about-- stay alive, go for the high score-- but if you don't care about these things there's no other hook. It's not like fighting games, where they throw in a story mode to sell copies to people who don't actually care much about fighting games. As they are, reviewers pick up games like this, brute force their way through the game in about 20 minutes with unlimited continues, and get pissed off because this stupid game was so short.

Well, Aksys is an odd bunch. They're publishing curiosities like Agarest War (their ad campaign goes "this game is kind of lame BUT YOU GET TO HAVE SEX WITH GIRLS") and the legendary Cho Aniki, the game nobody believed would leave Japan. They are the kind of company that, faced with the utterly disastrous leak of its cash cow, Blazblue: Continuum Shift, made an MPAA joke of the whole business. And now, Aksys is betting on Cave.

The recent Deathsmiles is getting a US 360 release. Perhaps the most otaku-appealing title in Cave's lineup, in Deathsmiles you fly a goth lolita through Monster World and blow up the best-named final boss of all time, Imperator Tyrannosatan. Will this game have the anime fan crossover appeal that most of Cave's games lack? It's likely! But is that enough to sell a 2D arcade shooter these days? On the Xbox 360, no less, the console that otaku in America hate and otaku in Japan love? That I'm not so sure about. Things like price are as yet unknown, but a fancy limited edition is already rumored. I'll buy the LE if it's not too creepy, but chances are extremely high that it will be. In any case, good luck to Aksys and Cave. Maybe they'll sell a couple this time.

Boy, it's good to sit down and watch some old-fashioned robot anime again. This is one of the many Mazinger "versus" movies, which lied to Japanese children all through the 70s. You see, while the title always implied that two famous Go Nagai characters would be beating each other up-- exciting kids all over Japan to no end, I'm sure-- when they got into the theater, it quickly became clear that this was, in fact, a team-up movie. At worst, Great Mazinger pilot Tetsuya and the Getter team have a rivalry. If I recall correctly, the only one of these movies in which the lead robots actually fight is Great Mazinger vs. Grendizer, in which Grendizer is possessed by evil aliens or some such.

Speaking of which, this movie is also about evil aliens. This snazzy UFO who's got flashing eyes and is prone to maniacal laughter visits the earth and drops off Girugirugan, who just loves to eat metal and destroy society. The Getter Robo team and Tetsuya in Great Mazinger take a shot at it individually (each in hopes of showing up the other), but they're both beaten badly. From here we take a page out of the Mazinger Playbook circa 1975: comic relief robot Boss Borot and girl robot Venus A have to distract the enemy (by getting pummeled) while the heroes regroup.

Once Getter and Mazinger are on the same page, it's just a matter of time until they finish this dude off with their laser beams and lightning and whatnot. But wait! Girugirugan eats the UFO and powers up: I think I played this level in Super Robot Wars once! The new and improved Girugirugan proves quite tough, so the guys take the most metal course of action, which is to fly into the thing and tear apart its internal organs. When that doesn't do the job, Great Mazinger stabs the monster in the eye with its twin swords, electrocutes it by shooting lightning at the swords, and Getter finishes the job with Getter Beam. After having worked together on such an elaborate kill, these guys are bros for life.

This is a perfectly average Mazinger movie. It does the job, yeah, but there's nothing special going on. If you watch one of these movies, make it Mazinger Z vs. the Grand General of Darkness. If you watch two, make the second one that awesome movie with Grenzider and Getter G and Great Mazinger. That movie owns. If you watch three, watch Mazinger Z vs. Devilman.

January 23, 2010

Well, guys, I'm cleaning out. There's no room around the house, and I
still need cash (and work). What's more, I'm in the classic otaku
dilemma of having more entertainment than I'll ever have time for in my
life. I know I'm never going to look at a lot of this stuff again, so
I'm letting it off. Last I sold something on Ebay it was a nightmare,
so I'm putting stuff up for grabs here, among other places. Comment on
this post if you're interested, and I will send you an email with
payment details. Paypal is preferred. Everything in this post is
subject to change. A couple of these things are up for sale on Amazon.
If they go there before they go here, I'll make a note of it.

If
you're local or in NYC at the time, there's no problem with you picking
up any of this stuff from me personally. I actually prefer a local
buyer, especially for something huge like the Arcade Style controller.
Pictures will be provided on request. Feel free to make an offer on any of the items, and I'll say yes or no.
For convenience's sake I'd like to keep the sales inside the US, but I
am open to international orders on smaller items like the games. The items are after the jump.

January 17, 2010

It's been a while since I played the "play a MAME ROM and report on its contents" game, so what the hell. I was tipped off to this game when Colony Drop bro Jeff linked me to this tournament video from the lovely folks at Mikado arcade, who seem to go out of their way to have tourneys for obscure, unusual and usually broken old fighting games. Behold their Jackie Chan In Fists of Fire tournament!

I'm a fighting game buff, but I did not know about Tecmo's Touki Denshou: Angel Eyes prior to today. This was with good reason: it's not terribly good. In the mid-90s, most of these games were collections of ideas flung at the wall, with a bare minimum of play testing and little thought as to how they would come together. It's hard enough to get a game done at all, you know?

This brings us to another major point: in this 2D fighting game, most of the characters are normally drawn 2D sprites, and four are hideous CG-rendered monstrosities. Lina in particular is among the ugliest videogame characters I have ever seen, not only because of the lack of detail in the character, but because she clashes so badly with her surroundings.

I'm speculating here, but 2D sprites these days are usually made by tracing over 3D models. Perhaps Angel Eyes wasn't getting done in time, so the developers decided to toss their raw materials up on the screen as a gimmick? The later PS1 version of the game apparently features conventionally drawn version of the CG characters, so that might just be what happened.

Anyway, let's put the eyesores aside and get to the game. It's one of those all-girl fighting games that came out in this era and weren't really expected to be good anyway. The sole unusual element is a flying air-dash mechanic that Arcana Heart would later directly lift over ten years later. Because the air dash is faster than running, all kinds of attacks can be chained one after the other (as in Darkstalkers or Guilty Gear), and finally, because the system opens up more combo possibilities than the designers had accounted for, matches in Angel Eyes are fast, aggressive, and finished in seconds. Matches even begin with the players being flung at each other in mid-air, rather than standing at a short distance from each other.

It's at the combos where this game gets kind of crazy. If you watch this video, you'll notice that every character has multiple combos that kill the opponent after a single hit connects: many of the tournament videos are over as soon as they start. They're not particularly complicated, as this genre goes: they just do that much damage. It's clear that nobody really gave the combo system a ton of thought, as I will demonstrate when I teach you, dear reader, how to do the game's simplest 100% damage combo.

I want you to actually take a close look at this picture. This is Raiya's light punch: it's very fast, reaches an unusually long distance, and it stuns the enemy for just a moment. The combo operates on those three points. It's very simple: just stand right next to your opponent-- as close as you can get-- hold forward, and press light punch repeatedly. You don't want to do this fast: allow a brief moment in between punches for your character to make the tiniest possible step forward. The idea is that as the jabs push your opponent back, you're counteracting that by moving yourself forward. Your opponent is still moving away from you, but it's happening very, very slowly, and you can continue to attack for a long time. Because the jab stuns for such a long time, there is nothing your opponent can do about this until they are pushed back out of range. If you start right next to them, as we did in this example, they are guaranteed to be KOed before that happens. This is not Raiya's best combo.

This kind of combo is actually rather common in the genre, but Raiya's is so simple, dumb, and potent that I have to imagine nobody playtested this game. Not that it particularly matters if somebody had found it, of course: everybody else has combos just as ridiculous. This is why the tourney matches are typically over in five seconds: it's like somebody edited Fate: Unlimited Codes down for time considerations.

In conclusion, this game has a character named Mysterious Power. She's an Anime American who says "OH MY GOD!" with a heavy accent when she loses. This is what Tecmo was up to in fighting games before Dead or Alive.

January 14, 2010

I realize this is a trash picture, but my camera decided to fall out of my hands and commit suicide in the making of this post. This is the only thing I've got anymore.

A long time ago, I noticed a test order for a $50 "bonus item" left on Rosenqueen's website and, being an ass, ordered it to see what would happen. Over a month passed and the order was entirely ignored, so I prodded the store into doing something, anything about this tragedy. The order was finally looked at-- and cancelled, and refunded-- but I was promised "something from the office" for my very minor trouble. Well, this morning a pair of Disgaea keychains arrived in the mail. If you put the cardboard bits together it becomes apparent that Laharl and Etna are in a rock band. They are rather, how you say, kawaii.

The moral of this story is to buy things that you don't even know what they are.

January 12, 2010

I was never much of a Shonen Sunday guy: as the great Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga once illustrated, it's always so bright and wiped-clean. If I'm going to read comics for ten-year-old boys about spirited young men punching things, I need there to at least be a little dirt on their faces. I'm more a Shonen Champion guy, or sometimes Shonen Magazine. Now I recently downloaded an old one-shot direct-to-video anime at random, as I often do. About five minutes in, I was thinking "SHONEN SUNDAY!" So clean, even in the 80s, even though it's about teen delinquents! I stuck it out, for some reason, and looked up the title about halfway through. Sure enough, this is an adaptation of a Shonen Sunday manga. I guess doing this for this long has given me some kind of special Japan-cartoon radar.

Kyou Kara Ore Wa!! (From Today On, I'll--!!) is about a teenager who wakes up on the morning of his first day at a new school and decides to become a delinquent. On his way to the barber, Mitsuhashi meets his soon-to-be-bro Ito, another clean-cut guy who's decided to do the same thing. Mitsuhashi comes out of one barber with a blonde perm, and Ito comes out with spikes a couple of feet tall. The two form an uneasy alliance based on their need to make fools of themselves out-manning each other, and since this is a shonen story they become the toughest guys in school like this. Hi-jinx ensue as these atypical tough guys take out the competition in wacky, underhanded ways.

It's pretty normal shonen comedy, really: about as Sunday as it gets. The hour-long OVA rapidly compiles stories from the manga and cuts off without any apparent loose ends, so I was left under the impression that this was a one-shot. Turns out there are nine more episodes of this: it was just that only one was subbed. Speaking of subbing, holy crap is this a bad fansub. It's not the worst I've ever seen and it's not as bad as a jokesub like [BEST]'s amazing and fitting job on Musashi Gundoh, but the whole thing's in broken English (leading to lines like the title of this post) and has one of the worst karaoke effects I have ever seen.

By the way, fansubbers? Feel free to abolish karaoke forever: it's led to some terrible excesses. Somebody else's cartoon is not the stage for your karaoke guy to show off what he can do with After Effects (in this case, block the screen). Just the lyrics are fine.

I am going to say it straight up: Bayonetta is the best game of its type yet made. If you're into action games at all and you have sixty bucks to spare, go buy it. You're going to love it. The game definitely has flaws, but it is still without question the best of the genre.

January 11, 2010

I realize now that I forgot to mention manga in my decade recaps. Well, I'll tell you two things: first, I bought a hell of a lot more manga than anime this decade because the former was at a reasonable impulse-buy price point and the other was not. Secondly, while it was still alive, I was reading Raijin Comics.

This article has already explained Raijin better than I could hope to: the first (and only, I assume) English-language weekly manga anthology, it came too early in the manga boom, was the direct opposite of what people wanted, and was basically ignored. We've seen overconfident, clueless Japanese companies enter the market since publisher Gutsoon failed with Raijin, and we'll see them again. Their fate always ends up the same. This isn't going to change until people start thinking differently up top, and the dinosaurs aren't hearing any of that.

That said, I used to love Raijin Comics. It was completely mismatched to the US manga market-- teenage kids who wanted brighter, shinier, cleaner and girlier stuff-- and that was why I loved it. The backbone of the mag was violent action manga for older guys: here was a manga compilation that ran Grappler Baki! I was quite happy to be reading this kind of stuff every week, and the side dishes were pretty eclectic: a couple of political thrillers, a dog comic. Manga anthologies are supposed to be disposable, but in Raijin's case, some of this stuff never saw print in English again. I kept all my copies. No, you can't have them.

Of course, I couldn't really afford a subscription to Raijin back then. If Raijin came back right now I still wouldn't be able to afford a subscription. It was $200 for a year: I recall there was a promised "free gift" for people willing to put down that change-- a Kenshiro action figure that was never actually produced-- but the high cost was just impossible to reconcile with a manga anthology. They are, after all, supposed to be disposable!

Instead, I would pick one up at the bookstore when I had the chance and hope I didn't miss too much. As it turned out, nobody could actually keep up with weekly Raijin, and the mag had to change its format to a monthly. I could keep up now, but as you already read, it didn't really help Raijin's business any.

Raijin kind of wanted to court the existing manga market, but like, say, the departed Central Park Media, they didn't really know or care why, so you got stuff like Bow Wow Wata in the mag towards the end. This was a straight-up kids' comic that stuck out like a sore thumb in the lineup: even magical girlfriend comic Mamotte Shugogetten felt like it was for teenagers at the youngest. Bow-Wow, on the other hand, was shooting firmly at the 10-or-so crowd. It was about a kid who could talk to dogs, if I recall, and wasn't even a terribly good kids' comic. Well, half-assing it will get you nowhere, and Bow Wow Wata didn't save Raijin. I remember the last few months mentioned in the article, when Raijin
was just throwing stuff at the wall in hopes it would stick, like the
"otaku for beginners!" Raijin Games and Anime mini-mag.

I don't think the publisher understood this, nor would they have accepted it, but what they were selling was clearly a minority interest magazine. Even today, the audience for the kind of stuff Raijin had on offer is much smaller than the larger manga readership. Those of us who read this kind of comic know this very well: that the publisher did not indicates the same kind of crippling, purposeful ignorance of the US market that ultimately dooms all of these Japanese business expeditions into the strange land of the barbarians.

I want to say that Raijin came too soon, that the market that would appreciate this stuff wouldn't come for another few years, but this is a world where nobody is buying Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Maybe there's just no place for this stuff.

If you want to get an idea of what Raijin was like, the closest you can easily get are collected volumes of their stuff, which still litter bargain bins if you look in the right places. Happy hunting, but keep in mind that Raijin didn't finish a single one of their comics, all of which had very long runs.

Unless you count Bomber Girl. You should probably just ignore Bomber Girl.